Trust Online: From E-Commerce to Recipe Sharing

Abstract

This chapter focuses on trust online. The first section briefly considers some of the earliest examples of unfair online community reviewing, especially ones that appear on the site of the online retailer Amazon. The bulk of the chapter is focused on the trustworthiness of recipes that are posted and shared online, presenting six models used to make readers trust recipes they find online: the community review model as represented by Allrecipes; the laboratory testing model as represented by Cook’s Illustrated; the scientific model as represented by Nathan Myrhvold, the Modernist Cuisine movement, and Alton Brown; the expert model as represented by the websites and blogs of ten professional chefs with well-trafficked websites; the corporate publishing model as represented by Epicurious, which reprints recipes formerly published in Gourmet or Bon Appetit magazines; and the corporate food products model as represented by the Betty Crocker brand of General Mills. The final section of the chapter looks at the information studies literature on trust, and how that literature addresses issues of trust in both restaurant reviewing and recipe sharing.

Trusting is hard. Knowing who to trust, even harder.

(Snyder 2008 as quoted in goodreads.com)